Poetry

  • Etruscan Song

    No love like mine; no love; no love like mine transformed a hotel room into a womb and a womb into the child’s cry; love, no love, no love like mine. Read in the dark, one hand on cock Etruscan lore in my Etruscan book— justice had another flavor there, buried the son to punish…

  • Beauty

    is one of the greatest mysteries of nature. * Every day a pressure rises, brutalities brew; the pure in spirit are tried as they accommodate the mechanical demands of the physical, repetitive world. Repetition for Divinity is myth; repetition for mortals is labor. “Row, row, row your boat.” * The mock-Homeric and the beautiful Alexandrian…

  • Recognitions

    Stories come to us like new senses a wave and an ash tree were sisters they had been separated since they were children but they went on believing in each other though each was sure that the other must be lost they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of as family resemblances features they…

  • Needle

    Make room, said he to the haystack. The point is great; take that; your groom arrives. Lie back; spread grass; never a borrower be. Rakes groom, he said, fakes doom—though choosers don’t mind beggars. Said the haystack: It’s a wedding night, so I’ll keep one eye half shut. (Clothes do make the man, said the…

  • The Book of Sleep (XVIII)

    You drove all night through thunderstorms, the PA turnpike slick and narrow in the passes. The tractor-trailers roaring, and sleep whistling past your ears . . . My heart was where a hundred roads         converged & then moved on         At one point you drove under a mountain. Later the sun unfolded over the…

  • Kings Go Forth

    From here it looks like forgiveness, the possibility of a man: himself a meadow I traverse by sight, by feel, hand over hand across the green of him, eyelight by eyelight until I take him all in. Or is it just the front yard again, azaleas, hot pepper plants, and a stand of pampas grass…

  • The Liberal

    Replace “snow” with “sparks” and see if the moral survives. Lie down and make a spark angel. Then replace “angel” with “angle” and see if morality survives. Our liberal society depends upon the difference of each flake and the capacity of the different flakes to form a drift. I looked down into my bowl of…